MED hopes to provide group of customers with low profile meters during December

MASSENA  The Massena Electric Department has decided to purchase and install upwards of 25 low-profile meters this winter in efforts to better track how much energy is used by certain customers during the colder months.

Treasurer Jeffrey M. Dobbins said that each low-profile meter will cost about $220 more than the current ones. However, there are important differences between the low-profile meters and the typical instruments.

A typical meter just is tracking your cumulative kilowatt hours or demand through the course of a month. A low-profile meter allows you to gather information on a shorter time frame, either hourly, 15 minutes, whatever you want to get a better understanding of when consumption is actually occurring, Mr. Dobbins said. We do have some already out in our service territory, but theyre only on some of our larger, industrial customers who want to utilize that data to help them analyze their load. Right now, though, we dont have any residential customers that have it, and thats what were looking at.

MED Superintendent Andrew J. McMahon said the meters, which are being purchased from Itron Inc., will be in limited use at first.

It will only be 20 to 30 customers so we can get a representative sample of residential usage patterns, Mr. McMahon said. It doesnt change the bills of those customers. Its just to help us understand better some typical usage patterns.

He said different types of customers, whether residential, business or industrial, likely will see different numbers.

What we want to understand is, from some individual customers, how closely does their individual load mirror our system load, Mr. McMahon said.

The meters will present power-use profiles for different classes of users.

So this low-profile meter, every hour its going to tell us how much have we consumed in that hour. Were going to know either through the 24 hours, or maybe on half-hour increments, how much have they consumed each half hour, Mr. McMahon said. Theyre not going to see any difference in their bill; were just going to understand better how people and when people are using their power.

Mr. McMahon said he expects the low-profile meters to arrive shortly after Thanksgiving and is optimistic for installation at the beginning of December.

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